Arma 3 Public Alpha Starts This Summer

Bohemia Interactive will be bringing their open-world shooter Arma 3 to E3 and Gamescom this summer. However, if you're not attending either even you'll still get a chance to try out the game in the coming months.

"Following E3, we plan to open up the game to our players," said Bohemia's Daniel Musil. "This process starts with the release of a playable build of Arma 3. We call it the 'Community Alpha'. It's intended to enable people who'd like to try the game early on in development help us to shape it up - and make Arma 3 the greatest release of the series. Ours is a large and complex game - being developed by a relatively small team - so we really appreciate your opinions, thoughts and feedback."

"The Community Alpha will be quite limited in terms of the assets it includes, with the goal of providing enough content to experiment with the brand new bits of gameplay and technology. It also enables our passionate community to prepare their mods for the very latest version of the Real Virtuality engine."

Bohemia will follow up the alpha with a larger beta test. They're hoping to officially release the game in the fourth quarer of 2012. Bohemia's original plan was to launch the full version this summer but they want to ensure that the finished product is as smooth as possible.

"With this additional time, we're focused upon creating a feature-rich, polished, and bug free experience. For us, it all comes down to delivering a quality product. We've achieved a great deal, but we don't want to rush things at the expense of what we finally deliver."

A new set of screenshots are below. If you're curious whether your computer will be able to handle these visuals, check out the (preliminary) system requirements from last summer.